Category Archives: Podcasts 2019

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC) Matt Bevan’s third series on Putin, Trump and Russia has come to a close. In Episode 8 “How Russia’s rotten gas got Trump into Trouble”, he backtracks to explain how Ukraine used the nuclear weapons that were left on its soil after the breakup of the Soviet Union to negotiate gas supplies from Russia and cold hard cash from the United States.  In Episode 9, the final one, “Putin’s greatest victory- a conspiracy theory so good it got Trump impeached” he looks at Trump’s support of Putin’s accusation that Ukraine is the baddie here, and how it benefits no one but Russia. And how deliciously ironic that our Australian Matt Bevan should have a name so similar to Matt Bevin, the republican governor of Kentucky who is making some very questionable pardons.

Earshot (ABC) This podcast from  August 20189 has been rattling round on the phone for a while. Naponi’s story: Loving a man with schizophrenia tells the story of a Sudanese woman now living in Toowoomba, whose husband has been committed to a psychiatric facility for the last fourteen years. After a long history of domestic violence against Naponi, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but this is rejected by many of the male elders in the Sudanese community, who accuse her of using domestic violence as a way of getting rid of him. Australian law, witchcraft and domestic violence all come together in a confronting case.

Torn Curtain: The Secret History of the Cold War (ABC) During summer, the ABC saves money by recycling programs from the previous year’s broadcasting. They dug quite a bit deeper than that in Torn Curtain, which was originally broadcast in 2006 as part of the still-missed Hindsight.  The fact that it’s now fourteen years old doesn’t matter: it’s a fantastic program. How could I know so little about my own century? I found Episode 2 Science, Spies and Australia’s bid for the bomb to be absolutely fascinating. Much of the material has been available only in the last twenty years or so. It tells the story of  Tom Kaiser, a Melbourne PhD student in London (very good paper on him by Phillip Deery here), who was a member of the Communist Party and fell under the scrutiny of Australian authorities who wanted to prove their ‘diligence’ so that Australia would be included in Britain’s plans for nuclear weapons. Episode 5 The Nuclear War we nearly had in 1983  was excellent too, about the build up of nuclear weapons in Western Germany and the horrifying potential for inadvertent nuclear war that they provoked.  It’s really worth listening to the whole five episodes.  How did I not know these things?

99% Invisible While in the Christmas mood, I listened to Episode 334 from December 2018. Called Christmas with the Allusionist, it’s a cross-promotion of the Allusionist podcast program, a podcast about language. This episode has two stories. The first is about an events manager in Birmingham England who decided to promote Winterval (a portmanteau of Winter and Festival), a 40 day event of which Christmas was a part, only to be accused of “Political Correctness Gone Mad”. The second part was about a re-creation of a ‘Dickensian’ village and the effect of Dickens in shaping our consciousness of Christmas ‘tradition’.

Amir Timur or Tamerlane  Photographer: Adam Jones https://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/7494229100

Empires of History – The Ottoman Series- Not many episodes left to listen to, but centuries of the Ottoman Empire left to go. I’ve got a feeling that this series is just going to peter out.Episode 11: Of Thy Insolence and Folly looks at the Battle of Ankara between the Thunderbolt Sultan Bayezid and Timur- better known to me as Tamerlane. Ye Gods, what a monster HE is! In Episode 12: The Battle of Ankara and the Death of Sultan Bayezid 1 follows through to Tamerlane’s victory.

My 2019 Adelaide Writers’ Festival. Perhaps I should just pretend that I’m there, eight months later! David Marr discusses the essays in his collection My Country, but it’s a pretty digressive (and, being David Marr, loquacious and at times rather arch) talk about his writing over the years, particularly his writing about ‘monsters’.

In Rise of the Right,chaired by Dominic Knight, there are three speakers: Carolin Emcke
(Against Hate), Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains) and Jeff Sparrow (Trigger Warnings.) This festival took place in March 2019, before the Australian Federal Election and there was still an expectation in this pro-Labor crowd that Labor would win, and Brexit was still a great muddle.  Emcke spoke about the European, and particularly German experience of the rise of hate, while Nancy MacLean spoke about the work of economist James McGill Buchanan and the influence of the Koch brothers in a determined attempt to subvert democracy. [There wasa great deal of controversy over this book when it was released in America].Jeff Sparrow spoke about the Australian experience, and the use by the right of the concept of ‘political correctness’ as a form of attack in the culture wars.  It’s an interesting podcast.

Aerial shot of Marree Man. Source: Wikipedia

Earshot (ABC) 24/10/19 Marree Man- is he a relation of Mungo Man perhaps? Well- no. He’s a huge carving of an Aboriginal man, etched into the red dust around the South Australian outback town of Maree 21 years ago. Yes- you read right- twenty one years ago, not 20,000. At four kms. in length and 28 kms in circumference, this is a huge piece of artwork – but who did it? Not  Erich Van Danikan’s Gods and their Chariots, but maybe  U.S. or Australian servicemen from the nearby Woomera base? Someone as a joke? It’s certainly a complex hoax, with fax machines clattering into life with mysterious faxes, and clues planted all over the world. The Mystery of the Marree Man is a fascinating podcast.

Hazel Rowley Lecture. Did you know that many of the Adelaide Writers Festival talks are available on podcast? In 2019 the Hazel Rowley Memorial Lecture was given by Maria Tumarkin, whose most recent book Axiomatic draws on the stories of multiple people, as did much of Hazel Rowley’s work with her joint biographies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre. In this lecture, Maria Tumarkin presents as series of nine alternative openings to her talk, covering a  range of perspectives on life writing, the ‘NON-fiction’-ness of non-fiction, the art of biography and the hard graft of writing.  She identifies as the ‘take-away’ of her lecture, as Americans would put it, and it is that the task of the non-fiction writer is to write about real people in a way that makes it impossible for them to be scooped up and repurposed, or turned into something or someone else, to meet other people’s fantasies.  The person, she says, is sovereign: they are never ‘character’. This beautifully-written lecture is read, so it is a little too garbled in places and rather stilted in its delivery but it is nonetheless excellent listening (although the interference of a lecture from an adjoining hall at the Writers Festival is distracting)

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC) In Episode 6 The Spies Who Suck at Spying, Matt Bevin looks at the Russian assassination attempts in England dating from the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, up to the unsuccessful poisoning of former Russian military office and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. (25/11/19)

Revolutionspodcast  While we’re over in Russia, Episode10.19 introduces Nicky and Alix, who were going to face the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. This is a pretty sympathic analysis of two people completely interwoven within the European royalty network of Queen Victoria’s children.  Episode 10.20 The Liberal Tradition (Such as it is) goes back to even Catherine the Great to examine people who might be described as ‘liberals’, even though they were few and far between, and reluctant to use the term. It then goes through the Tsar Liberator in the 1870s, the repression of Alexander III and culminating with historian and politician Pavel Milyukov who would become involved with the Constitutional Democratic Party (known as the Kadets)

Letters of Love in World War II. That’s it- it’s over. What a fantastic podcasts!!!  Listen to them!! Home at Last: Grief and Relief.  I hadn’t really thought about those months after the war was over, with the German soldiers coming home to Germany.  You’re told in the very first episode that Cyril and Olga went on to have a happy marriage together, so you know that nothing awful is going to happen at the last minutes before he gets home.  Really, really good.

Rough Translations.   Ghana’s Parent Trap  (20/06/18 – yes, it’s old)  In Ghana, parents ambitious for their children’s education send them to school at ONE year old, and expect rote learning and homework. A program to instruct teachers in play-based education had results, but when it was extended to the parents, it did not go as planned.

History Workshop. My very wise PhD supervisor, Richard Broome, advised me that when you’re presenting a paper at a conference, you should work on a ratio of 140 words per minute available to you. It’s a shame that Yasmin Khan wasn’t given the same advice when she presented her 2019 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture on “Women on the Frontline of Empire”. The podcast itself is interesting- looking at women during WWII across the empire (Africa, India, to a lesser extent Australia and Canada) and how the stationing of soldiers affected them, and the economic changes for individual countries brought about by the empire’s involvement in war.  But … her presentation is so fast and garbled that it’s really hard work.

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC). Episode 5  (18/11/19) When the Father of Brexit met Mother Russia is a bit of a misnomer, because there is no evidence (yet) that Nigel Farrage, (the Father of Brexit) actually met with Putin or his operatives. This episode traces the rise of Nigel Farrage, prompted by Mad Cow Disease of all things, and claims that Russia influenced the Brexit campaign through social media.

RevolutionsPodcast  Episode 10.18 The Witte System. Well, if the peasants aren’t up to a revolution, and your bourgeoisie is non-existent, what’s a revolutionary to do? Fortunately Sergei Witte (never heard of the man) arrived in Russia to stimulate an industrial economy and build the Trans-Siberian Railway.

RevolutionsPodcast.  After blowing up the Czar, the revolutionaries went into exile in Europe and began having theoretical arguments amongst themselves.  Episode 10.17 The Emancipation of Labour Group goes through the arguments mounted by different groups e.g. you had to allow industrialization so that the industrial proletariat could rise up like Marx predicted; or you had to rely on the peasants because Russia was different to other countries and hadn’t even embarked properly on feudalism; or – from Marx and Engels themselves- criticism that Marxism was being twisted out of its original meaning.

Letters of Love in World War II. Oh no- only one more episode after this. Episode 7: Bergen-Belsen: Sorrow and Shock, deals with late 1944 to mid 1945. The people of England are anticipating that the war will soon by over, but Cyril knows that it may take longer. Faced with ‘ordinary’ Germans, Cyril finds their instructions against fraternization to be very harsh, but Olga is more clear-sighted, especially in view of the news coming out from the concentration camps.

Shaping Opinion. (August 5 2019)  I’m on a bit of an Irish Famine thing at the moment, but I’m almost ready to leave it alone.  In The Famine that Changed Ireland and America podcaster Tim O’Brien interviews Christine Kinealy, the Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, an author, and a member of the Irish American Hall of Fame. She says much the same things: that it wasn’t that there wasn’t enough food but the problem of access and that the British Government was inexorably wedded to an ideology that made things worse. She also argues that even for those who emigrated to America, it wasn’t really until the 1960s with the election of President Kennedy that they felt American. She suggested that the prominence of the Irish Famine in the historiography is largely due to the Irish Peace Treaty and the Celtic Tiger economy of the 1990s which encouraged Irish people to look back at their history.

Vickers- Vimy that Ross and Keith Smith flew between London and Darwin Source: Wikipedia

The History Listen (12/11/19)  I write a regular feature in our Heidelberg Historical Society newsletter about what happened in the Heidelberg district one hundred years ago. One hundred years ago, the Great Air Race between London and Darwin brought fame and celebrity to the winners, Ross and Keith Smith and two mechanics Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers. Their achievement is celebrated in The great air race, but unfortunately for me, the contribution of Cedric Ernest Howell from Heidelberg is only a footnote.  And if you want to find out more, you could join Heidelberg Historical Society for only $40.00 and have access through our newsletter to my pearls of wisdom every two months about Heidelberg 100 Years ago!!! (including a piece about Cedric Ernest Howell)

The Documentary (BBC) 14/08/19 Another podcast that has been hanging round on my phone for ages, Peterloo: The massacre that changed Britain commemorates the 200th anniversary of this repression of popular dissent in 1819.  It tells the story of the massacre, also commemorated in the recent Mike Leigh film, and interviews descendants of people who participated in the protest.

Empires of History Podcast Well, I’ve finished my U3A class on the Ottoman Empire, and this podcast is still back in the 14th century, and they seem to stop completely in June 2019. S Episode 9  The Thunderbolt Turns to Europe has Sultan Bayezid going into Anatolia. Episode 10, which is in two parts is called A Crusade Dies at Nicopolis, and it goes through Sultan Beyezid’s battle with the European Crusaders, headed by King Sisimund of Hungary. This sure is blood-thirsty history- on both sides.

The History Listen (ABC) In War Recipes (5/11/19) the theme of food amongst starving prisoners is explored, through recipe books compiled clandestinely by prisoners. One is a metal-bound recipe book compiled by POW Ron Foster in Borneo as a ‘dream cookbook’ to share with his family when he returned home; the second was a communal cookbook compiled by women at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.

Rear Vision (ABC) The Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it was up. In The Making and Breaking of the Berlin Wall (10/11/19) I was fascinated to learn that only about 2km of the wall still stands, and that it now has to have heritage protection!

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC) Gee I like this program. Episode 3 How To Spin A War (4/11/19) is about Russia’s invasion of both Ukraine and the Crimea and its success in muddying the waters so much that in the end you really aren’t quite sure what happened.

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC) Series 3 has started! This time Matt Bevan is looking at Putin’s strategy of destabilization in the west- how prescient, given that Ukraine now lies at the heart of the Democrat’s impeachment case.  In Episode 1 (21/10/19) , A Cold Wet Day in Salisbury Matt returns to the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skipral, the event that first drew his attention to Putin and his reach.  Episode 2 From Spymaster to President (28/10/19) looks at Putin’s need to always have an enemy against which to mobilize Russian society.

Source: Wikipedia

In Our Time I’ve just read a bookabout the Irish Famine, and so I finally got round to listening to this episode The Great Irish Famine, dated 4/4/19. Among other things, most of which were covered in the book by Enda Delaney that I read, they do discuss whether the Irish Famine constituted a genocide. One of the historians (they’re often hard to distinguish in this program) argued very strongly that it was not genocide because, despite the disdain for the Irish, there was no intent to kill them off. However, there was a strong determination to implement dramatic social change in Ireland as a way of solving what seemed the intractable problem of poverty.  Instead of seeing migration (especially to America) as a penalty, they argue that there would have been many, many more deaths without that escape valve.